She’s on the membership rolls of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art and the Museum of Modern Art and subscribed to the
Roundabout Theatre Company, the city’s biggest nonprofit theater
group.

A Bronx-born retired New York State employee, Feinberg
dropped the axe on the Roundabout after six years.

“It just got too expensive,” she said of the Roundabout,
which for the remainder of the season offers a three-show series
starting at $219. “There are so many different ways of getting
theater discounts.”

Subscriptions, which date from the Theatre Guild in the
first half of the last century, are meant to provide a financial
cushion to groups offering challenging work.

But a dragging economy, a growing aversion to long-range
planning and competition from an ever-expanding range of cheap
entertainment options are reconfiguring the culture business in
New York and elsewhere.

Revenue from subscribers fell 18 percent in the five years
ending in 2011, according to a survey of 113 nonprofit theater
groups by the Theatre Communications Group. Renewals at the
Metropolitan Opera have fallen from 89 percent in 2007-08 to 84
percent last season, according to a December filing for bond
investors.

Subscriptions “have been trending downward for most
performing arts groups, and the Met is no exception,” Peter
Clark, a spokesman, said in an e-mail.

Members Bail

The Roundabout has seen a 40 percent drop in subscribers,
from a peak of 47,000 in 1998-99 to 28,000 last season,
according to filings and tax returns. Subscription sales for the
company, which operates three Broadway and two off-Broadway
houses, fell by a quarter since 2008-09 to $9 million.

Some nonprofits are circumventing the trend by selling
memberships, in which a small annual fee gives theatergoers a
first shot at low-price tickets.

Lincoln Center Theater’s roughly 30,000 members pay $50 a
year for access to discounted seats. The company instituted the
program in 1986 and last admitted new members in August 2010.

The Met Museum had a record 170,398 members at the end of
June, up 22 percent from a year earlier. Members get easier
access to hit shows like the fashion designs of the late
Alexander McQueen, where non-members waited as long as three
hours.

“We had people buy memberships so they could go to the
front of the queue,” said Thomas Campbell, the Met’s director,
in an interview.

Ambiguous Model

The membership model, however, brings far less upfront
money into the coffers of companies already dealing with reduced
public support for the arts. That’s left more managers
scrambling to make up the difference.

“Subscription theaters aren’t competing with Broadway,”
said Greg Mosher, the former director of Lincoln Center Theater.
“They’re competing with every possible other thing an audience
member might do.”

Roundabout is exploring how to maintain and expand its
audience, Managing Director Harold Wolpert said.

“Consumer behavior has changed, yet subscriptions remain
viable and desired,” he said in a statement to Bloomberg. “We
have to provide flexibility within our subscription model and
are offering a range of ways audience members can have a
relationship with us.”

Subscriptions tumbled at many theaters after 9/11, said
Andrew Hamingson, executive director of Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s
Warehouse since 2012.

‘Accelerated Erosion’

“Whether it had to do with mortality, whatever the
psychology of that was, we saw an accelerated erosion,” said
Hamingson, who helped run the Public Theater and has done
consulting for other groups.

Retaining subscribers costs less than finding single-ticket
buyers. And losing subscribers weakens the donor base, said Ben
Cameron, who supervises the arts program at the Doris Duke
Charitable Foundation.

“Subscribers have traditionally been low-hanging fruit for
donor drives,” Cameron said. “If we no longer have
subscribers, the path to donors is harder to find.”

The Roundabout is launching a $50 million fundraising
campaign, according to a filing. It’s also updated its look with
a sleek new logo.

Trend Buckers

“Now they say, ‘We’re not going to throw the baby out with
the bathwater,’” she said.

Among those bucking the decline is New York Theatre
Workshop. With its public profile increasing from two shows that
transferred to Broadway --“Peter and the Starcatcher” and
“Once” -- subscriptions have nearly doubled since 2009 to pre-recession levels of about 4,000.

And subscriptions are up 40 percent since 2010-11 at New
York’s Signature Theatre, where tickets to initial runs are all
$25. The number of subscribers, now about 7,000, is capped to
create a balance between subscribers and single ticket buyers,
the Signature said in a statement.

For companies lacking a hedge-fund manager to subsidize
seats -- the Signature has Pershing Square Capital Management’s
William Ackman, who donated $25 million -- there are no easy
answers.

Younger audiences that have grown up with the instant
gratification of the Internet want what they want when they want
it, said Mosher, the former Lincoln Center Theater chief. “And
it’s hard to think of anything more antithetical to this habit
than the subscription season.”

Muse highlights include Jason Harper on cars and Rich
Jaroslovsky on tech.